The Surprising Realities of Mythical Creatures

by Ker Than | May 23, 2007 05:58pm ET

This painted wooden weathervane was carved by Warren Gould Roby, an American coppersmith, between 1825 and 1850. Originally made for use on the roof of his own home in Massachusetts, it is now considered a classic American expression of the feminine beauty of the mermaid.Credit: Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont

NEW YORK—While sailing the ocean near Haiti, Christopher Columbus in 1493 reported seeing three mermaids from a distance. The Genoese explorer was not impressed.

Up close, the sea maidens were “not as pretty as they are depicted,” he wrote in his journal, “for somehow in the face they look like men.”

Many scientists now think that what Columbus probably saw was a manatee, an aquatic mammal that resembles a flippered hippo.

In a new exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) here this weekend, viewers can digitally superimpose the picture of a mermaid atop that of a manatee and see how Columbus and countless other sailors might have been fooled.

Entitled Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids, the exhibition traces the possible origins of some of the world’s most famous “imaginary” beasts and also their lesser-known counterparts.
Nature and myth

“This museum has a long history of studying and presenting great stories about the natural world and the culture of humanity,” said AMNH president Ellen Futter at a press preview of the exhibition earlier this week. “In this exhibition, we extend that tradition further, by looking at the intersection of nature and culture, those moments when people glimpse something fantastical in nature.”

The exhibition deftly combines nature and myth, paleontology and anthropology, and delightfully campy models of mythical creatures with real fossils.

Upon first entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a 17-foot-long, green, European dragon of the sort that legend says Saint George slew. Its sinuous and colorful Chinese counterpart hangs from the ceiling in one of the last rooms of the exhibition. In the mythical water-creatures section, large tentacles and the head of a giant squid-inspired kraken rise from the floor, its body mostly hidden.
An imaginary bestiary
Mythic Creatures borrows specimens and artifacts from the fossil, art and anthropological collections of the AMNH and other museums, and examines how such objects might have—through imagination, misidentification, speculation or outright deception—given birth to fantastical creatures.

“Faced with awesome nature, our imaginations might create something to be revered, something beautiful, something to be gently feared or something simply whimsical and playful, perhaps even magical,” Futter said. “I trust that this exhibition will show you a little of all of these.”

Visitors can touch a real narwhal tusk, which for centuries many Europeans accepted as proof of the unicorn’s existence. Or glimpse the beaked skull of a protoceratop dinosaur, one of the fossil animals that practically litter the Gobi Desert even today, and which traders long ago might have mistaken for the remains of a griffin—a mythical creature with the head and forelimbs of an eagle and the body of a lion.

The exhibition makes a convincing argument for why the same creatures pop up in the stories of cultures separated by great spans of time and distance. Mermaids, for example, were probably born in the minds of lonely European sailors, and as their boats touched shore around the world, the image of the half-woman, half-fish creature spread, often becoming intermixed with local beliefs.

“This is a really intriguing form—the idea of a beautiful woman who also lives in the water,” Laurel Kendall, one of the museum’s anthropology curators, told LiveScience. “People who have water goddesses, it seems when they encounter the image of the mermaid, [they find] this is a great way to represent them.”
Trivia

Mythic Creatures introduces visitors to imaginary beasts most of us have probably never heard of. There is the Japanese “Kappa,” a green monkey-faced creature that had an appetite for children and cucumbers. Kappas lived in ponds but occasionally walked on land. They had bowl-shaped indentations on their heads, where they kept a shallow pool of pond water that was the source of their power. Travelers encountering a Kappa late at night were advised to bow; when the Kappa bowed in turn, it would spill its water and, powerless, scurry back to its pond.

The exhibition is also a rich source of mythical creatures’ trivia. Visitors can learn, for example, that, according to Marco Polo, Genghis Khan possessed the feather of a Roc—a mythical giant bird said to dine on elephants—but that Polo’s translator, Sir Henry Yule, suspected the feather was only a palm-tree frond.

And, according to the exhibition, not everyone agreed with Columbus about mermaids. Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame reported that a mermaid he once glimpsed was “by no means unattractive.”

Whether homely or beautiful, the monsters and beasts that once haunted the collective imaginations of our ancestors are given new life in Mythic Creatures.

Ker Than

Ker was a staff reporter for Live Science and Space.com and has freelanced for various outlets, including New Scientist and Popular Science. He has degrees from the University of California, Irvine and New York University, including a masters degree in science journalism.